Rings Discovered Around a Moon for the First Time

Riding with Robots writes "It turns out that one of the Ringed Planet's moons has rings of its own. The robotic spacecraft Cassini at Saturn has discovered that the icy moon Rhea is orbited by an extensive debris field and at least one ring, the first such system found. 'Many years ago we thought Saturn was the only planet with rings,' said one mission scientist. 'Now we may have a moon of Saturn that is a miniature version of its even more elaborately decorated parent.'"

Re:Dumb question: Why are they 2 dimensional?

[Anonymous Coward]

Conservation of angular momentum.

Re:Funny timing

[AikonMGB]

Its too bad L1-3 are unstable.. you'll still need small maneuvering thrusters/attitude gyros etc. to keep your craft from straying too far from the equilibrium point. L4 and L5 are dynamically stable, but there's also a lot of other cruft just lying around there that you'd have to shield against.

But yes, Lagrange points are awesome and we need to exploit them more!

Aikon-

From the Earth To the Moon

[Timothy Chu]

All this talk about orbiting the moon and the Lagrange point reminded me of Jules Verne's "From the Earth To The Moon", a surprisingly accurate description of lunar travel written 140 years ago. I only wish space travel were as simple as he described.